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Battle between individual and societal nature of human being.

Some nights ago, we, my wife and I with a couple of my friends, had rather long yet nice discussion about our future “jobs”. Since long time ago, I am trying to understand where are different desires coming from. I noticed that there are two different main deriving forces behind what we like to do. The first force, is originating from within our inside and only depends on the bare self of ourselves, which I call it the individuality . Learning, being challenged, doing something independent of people around us, are all have roots in this part of self. The other force has its roots in our human-human interaction, which I label it the sociality. Doing something useful for now or the future of human being, helping others, being useful for others, all are originated from this part of human nature.

I don’t see any reason why these two forces could not act cooperatively, however, it seems that finding a job inline with both human needs is a little bit hard in practice. For example, being a nurse, or a secretary, or being involved in many other (social service) occupations similar to those, contains a lot of positive social interaction, however, may not seem have any direct contribution to individuality (at least it is not obvious to me). On the other hand, doing research on fore example, number theory, or pure learning, or even things like meditating alone, may satisfy individuality, however, may not contribute to the social nature of us, directly.

This is where teaching comes into the play. I feel in the fields with strong individual senses, one way to contribute to sociality is to teach what we learn to others. Here, it reminds me of a joke by one of ECE (electrical and computer engineering) faculty members saying that, the only benefit of getting PhD in ECE is to teach others to get their PhD in ECE. What I am trying to say is that, teaching may seem satisfactory in some sense, however, it may not be constructive. Don’t get me wrong, I believe teaching to youth are very productive, but, teaching to young generation such as high school students, is/may not (be) very self-satisfactory.

I feel that for every person there is a boundary (may be narrow) which these two forces are balanced. finding that boundary does not seem very easy, and even after finding that doing something on that line may not be straightforward. At the end, I should like to note that I believe something as simple as writing would embrace both human needs/desires at the same time.

I personally believe that not moving along this border line of enriching both of the above mentioned human needs (sociality and individuality), may results in lot of unhappiness and consequently many mental misbehaviours respectively.

Here, the main question yet remained open, how possibly we can find this border line for ourselves?